Level 3 blames Internet slowdowns on Technica

Fri Mar 21 16:21:20 UTC 2014

On Friday, March 21, 2014 05:59:54 PM Naslund, Steve wrote:

> So, as far as the government or Wall Street funding the
> build out of the commercial Internet, that is not what
> happened.

Lots of terrestrial and submarine optical fibre was built in 
the late 90's, and much of it has either gone unused until 
now, or saw lots of M&A's as a result of the bust that left 
hundreds-of-millions of dollars in investment with just a 
few cents on the dollar, over night.

Many of those cable systems go by other names you may know 
today.

The Internet isn't one thing.

> I see no reason why the US model would not work in any
> market economy.  It is a simple matter of supply and
> demand.  If your economy cannot afford the
> infrastructure or the people have no money to pay for
> services, you are going to have a problem.  There is a
> huge problem in that people think GOVERNMENT
> FUNDED=FREE,  it does not and in most cases is more
> expensive than the commercial alternatives since there
> is no motivation to be efficient.

No one said they wanted anything free. Everyone knows free 
Internet only exists at Starbucks and your next Internet 
communit conference - and even that is not always reliable.

In Africa and parts of Asia, supply and demand is equally 
rife. In fact, in some cases, supply outstrips demand. We 
could get into a lot of reasons why supply won't reach out 
to demand, but I'd be digressing.

Suffice it to say, while over-supply may be present, it's in 
the hands of the few who all concert (mostly unknowingly) to 
keep prices high. As you know, no one will invest in 
something for a 20-year return. But by the same token, fibre 
lives for a long while; trying to recoup your investment in 
six months is not going to help anyone (except open up 
competition against you, the one who probably went in 
first).

The need for "neutral" infrastructure which is reasonably 
and well commercially run is likely a solution to better 
pricing with professional quality, or the knife that butters 
the price decline wheat.

> In that case a hybrid approach like I used in helping
> schools in the Philippines will work better.  We used
> government funding and private grants to provide high
> speed internet to rural schools and we did it by buying
> commercial available wireless and cable services.  This
> helps the people and also helps grow the communications
> industry there.  The government does nothing but pay the
> bills (and they rarely even do that right).

And I do agree that a hybrid approach with a neutral fibre 
backbone is what is lacking with these national projects.

The governments building these backbones know little about 
how the Internet really works (which includes DNS, ICANN, 
and that free things don't work :-). What is needed is clue 
going into these projects that help turn the national 
project into a well-run, commercial businesses that looks 
after itself, but also fufills the goal of ubiquitous 
connectivity.

The hurdle isn't running the network. The hurdle is getting 
the fibre into the ground - and that is a monumentous 
hurdle. Running the network is where it all falls apart if 
unchecked.

Mark.
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